Twentieth Century Vole

“It all changed when I learned about the prairie voles,” she says—surely not a phrase John Rawls ever uttered.

She told the story at the natural-history museum, in late March. Montane voles and prairie voles are so similar “that naifs like me can’t tell them apart,” she told a standing-room-only audience (younger and hipper than the museum’s usual patrons—the word “neuroscience” these days is like catnip). But prairie voles mate for life, and montane voles do not. Among prairie voles, the males not only share parenting duties, they will even lick and nurture pups that aren’t their own. By contrast, male montane voles do not actively parent even their own offspring. What accounts for the difference? Researchers have found that the prairie voles, the sociable ones, have greater numbers of oxytocin receptors in certain regions of the brain. (And prairie voles that have had their oxytocin receptors blocked will not pair-bond.)

Prairie voles. Oxytocin receptors. It’s not…this person is kind and generous while that person is cruel and ruthless. It’s oxytocin receptors. It is disconcerting. Shakespeare and Austen suddenly seem beside the point.

“As a philosopher, I was stunned,” Churchland said, archly. “I thought that monogamous pair-bonding was something one determined for oneself, with a high level of consideration and maybe some Kantian reasoning thrown in. It turns out it is mediated by biology in a very real way.”

That the distribution of oxytocin receptors influences an animal’s behavior is not especially surprising. The interesting question, if we may be adaptationist, is what niche factors select for such different behaviors in closely related species. How is it an evolutionarily stable strategy for montane voles to be such pricks?

Isn’t this a bit like a believer saying ‘without god, it’s all meaningless!’? To which a reply might be, it’s not more meaningless than it was before. Same here, if it’s Oxcytocin and not categorical imperative, doesn’t mean it stops morality. Or we could quote Feynman (sp?) when he pointed out that a better understanding of the universe doesn’t detract from one’s wonder, but adds to it.

Of course, I may have totally missed your point Ophelia. You’re a fair bit more nuanced than this little yobbo. :)

I thought that was a very interesting article. And the point to me was how ingrained our belief of the body and soul as separate things. Churchland is a neuroscientist/philosopher who was already convince that the mind is influenced by body yet couldn’t make the leap intuitively that our minds all due to chemical reactions.

cass_m (#7), it’s harder for some than others, though. In my case I don’t see it as either/or. Explanations are a matter of levels, chosen for convenience. I don’t need to descend to the electrochemical level to explain that I’m going to the store to buy milk and paper towels unless something goes terribly wrong or I’m conducting a scientific experiment. The supposed contradictions between scientific and mundane (once known as “naive”) realism are…..not. They blend easily. Monogamy as a matter of belief and as a matter of receptors just doesn’t look like a difficult problem. Can’t the chair be made of wood and plant cells and molecules and so on and on and….?

. “I thought that monogamous pair-bonding was something one determined for oneself, with a high level of consideration and maybe some Kantian reasoning thrown in. It turns out it is mediated by biology in a very real way.”

And, of course, if there were a god and it meant for humans to pair-bond for life, then our oxytocin receptors would be set on full phaser. There’d be no need for divorce courts, internet dating, or “massage” parlors.

@ernie The voles just demonstrated how much of what we think of as conscious choices (monogamy) may not be as under our control as we thought. The crux of her paper is that ethics can come from neighbours as easily as from professional philosophers because people think in terms of social mores rather than abstracts. We just don’t think that deeply about most stuff, including how intertwined our mind and brain actually are.

I would expect it to be equally challenging to our “intuitions”, that assumed profound, possibly complex and “deeply felt” emotions very likely is shared with other animals (at a very fundamentally level). Especially that such emotions can be “switched off” (physically or chemically).

It’s an interesting example, but 1) humans aren’t voles (in case you didn’t notice); and 2) surely it’s not as simple as oxytocin receptors alone? I suspect it would be a much more complex dynamic at work, including environmental factors, as someone commented above. And with humans, cultural and social factors would surely come into play, perhaps even epigenetically. Maybe reading Kant and Austen can switch on our oxytocin receptors . . . now there’s a thought.

On a more serious note: in prairie voles, pair-bonding is also associated with high levels of aggression by male voles towards intruders. Whilst one should always be careful about transferring evidence from other creatures to humans, it does raise the interesting question of whether societies that promote traditional conservative lifelong pair-bonding might have higher levels of violence.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter if culture is neurochemically determined, unless you’re the kind of person who thinks that other people ought to be injected with drugs to make them behave the way you’d like.

Emotions and thoughts are real physical/chemical processes- news at 11!

My favourite neuroscience joke: two students are in love. One of them comes back from a lecture and says “Apparently the emotion of love is mediated by hormones and signalling molecules such as oxytocin”. And the other one says “See, I told you love was real”.

I would expect it to be equally challenging to our “intuitions”, that assumed profound, possibly complex and “deeply felt” emotions very likely is shared with other animals (at a very fundamentally level).

To me, it would be much more counterintuitive to think that they weren’t shared (not in some lofty, conscious form, but as you say, at a fundamental level). It seems a bit silly to assume that people who don’t share your intuition must be ignorant of the research. (It’s not like this is a particularly new idea.)

What it shows *me* at least (and I’ve been a fan of the Churchlands’ work for quite a while now – ever since reading _The Computational Brain_ and _On the Contrary_) is how small differeneces – at least to us – at one level can lead to drastically different outcomes. There are, of course, lots of examples of this in the strictly biological realm, but a psuchbiological one is quite interesting. Needless to say, a lot of work has to be done before the lesson for humans directly can be learned, but a start is a start.

I’m with Charles Sullivan on this one. I’m not satisfied. There is too much biology, not enough ethics, in Pat Churchland’s approach. I haven’t had the chance to read the book yet, though I’ve got it, but there is an important difference between voles and humans, in that, oxytocin and pair-bonding or not, information such as this can be taken into account when making choices — which is why I have a problem with Sam Harris’s “You do not choose what you choose”. Perhaps we cannot override the effect of brain chemicals altogether, but Dawkins’ idea that we can strive against the selfish replicators is an important one. There is still a gap between “is” and “ought”. This becomes very clear towards the end of Shea’s article when the question of “objective” values is raised. While allowing that context can make a difference — well, of course it can! — Churchland still holds that there are objective values. But what she cannot show, I think, is that what contemporary moral philosophy has been seeking is exceptionless rules. Certainly, Roman Catholic natural law ethics thinks it has achieved this, but I challenge Churchland to find the quest for exceptionless rules at the heart of contemporary moral philosophy. Why should she think this, and who did she have in mind?

My money’s always been on vole culture and religion as the main determinants of their reproductive behaviour. I’ve never been big on vole free will, though.

Seriously, I don’t think neurochemistry makes literature or philosophy obsolete. We just need frequent updates to both by writers who can incorporate our increasing understanding of human nature. Perhaps less about “free will” and more about how we can bring better models into our thinking to make wiser life choices.

After reading a bit of invertebrate porn that P.Z. Myers put up, where sex was accomplished by the male spooning his stuff into the appropriate orifice in the female, my initial reaction was “Why would anyone want to do that? That doesn’t seem like much fun.” But, come to think of it, what we do is pretty ridiculous too. The most important thing in the world, the focus of all our songs and stories, is matching just one of our funny-looking appendages with precisely the appropriate opening, exactly like every other mammal. Let’s hear it for human exceptionalism!